How to find a great designer

Hiring a graphic designer can help improve your coaching business by boosting your professional appearance, creating consistency in your visual brand for better recognizability, helping you effectively communicate with clients, and, best of all, allowing you to have more time to focus on what you do best.

Prepare:
Before you begin your search, you will need to have a clear idea of what you want to accomplish. Are you needing a logo and branding package? A brochure? Stationery set? A website? Put together a clear list of what you need to accomplish as well as any expectations, deadlines and budget.

Research:
Search for designers in your area. Ask other professionals for recommendations. Find a website or brochure you really like, contact their marketing department to see who they used. Once you’ve located three to five potential designers, check out their work on their websites. See what companies they’ve done work for, what experience they have, and if they have done work similar to what you are looking for. If the information is not readily available on their site, ask them questions such as their ability to stick to a schedule, their communication with clients, what services they provide, the number of revisions included in quoted prices and if their rates are hourly or by project. If they do not have an online portfolio, ask to see samples of their work.

Evaluate:
Based on their work, their quoted price and your budget, you should be able to narrow down the candidates. Their portfolio will give you a good sense of their personal style and capabilities. If their work does not convey the feel you are wanting for your piece, then continue your search to find someone who will be able to deliver a final product that will meet your needs.

Select:
Once you have located a designer that fits your needs, communicate clearly with them your objectives and keep in close communication throughout the design process. Be sure to get some sort of written agreement before any work begins. It is important to keep up your end of the deal with getting back to them with any content or feedback in a timely manner. Listen to any advice or guidance that they may have. You are paying them to be the professional.

Stephanie Wright is ICF’s Brand Designer. She joined the staff in August 2012 and has since helped strengthen ICF’s visual brand. She was an integral part of releasing ICF’s Brand Manual and has been working with chapters to help them strengthen their brand identity in alignment with ICF Global. Whenever you come across a beautiful brochure, a pretty ICF webpage, or a visually stunning edition of Coaching World—you can thank Stephanie! Find more of her work at swrightcreative.com. If you liked this article, check out Stephanie’s latest piece in the February edition of Coaching World, entitled “Visually Enhancing Your Online Brand.”

Are you making the most of your online audience?

You may already have a presence on various social platforms, but are you really utilising these effectively to bring in the sales? Nicola Bird reveals how to boost sales and generate valuable income via promoting your business to your online audience.

Have you ever heard the phrase the ‘busy fool’? For many business owners, this is their reality. They work all hours of the day servicing their 1:1 clients, often into the evenings. Time for personal and family activities becomes few and far between. Those whose only revenue comes from selling their 1:1 will always be limited by how much they can physically and mentally deliver in a day, week or month. They will never be able to break through that ceiling, unless they can charge significantly more for their 1:1 time.

For me, the move to online coaching literally transformed my business overnight as one of my first product promotions resulted in $24,000 of sales, the majority of which were a passive revenue stream for me.

I am not alone in my experiences either. There are many people out there making impressive revenues by selling their services online. The great thing about it is that it applies to any type of coaching or training, not just the traditional personal or professional development coaching.

I know one lady who was a personal fitness instructor who made thousands from selling an online fitness boot camp, containing content she had created years before, but never found a way to utilise properly. What I love about that particular story is that it was simply creating additional revenue from what she already had in place AND it was a totally new market, which opened up for her and one that she’d never really thought about before as she could reach clients now that she physically just hadn’t been able to do before.

If you were wondering if this would work for you, I would encourage you to ask yourself one simple question. Are you limiting yourself by not thinking outside of the box and exploring new routes to market and new customer bases? Are there ways of attracting new business that you haven’t even thought of yet and if you did, what impact could they make to you, your family and your lifestyle?

It does take some thought to work out how to package up what you do into products your clients actually want to buy, but once you’ve made that first online sale, you can do over and over again. I still love my 1:1 coaching as it brings me great fulfilment and helps to keep me challenged to develop my skills and experience, but having more than one route to market and multiple revenue streams means I get to live life the way I want to and that is absolutely priceless.

By Nicola Bird. With an MSc in Occupational Psychology and a diverse range of business experience, mother of three Nicola Bird went from earning $0 to over $500,000 online by mastering technology to transform her coaching business. She created JigsawBox as a way for her clients to access her expertise online in a flexible and affordable way, whilst leaving her free to concentrate on growing her business and spending time with her young children. Through JigsawBox, Nicola helps its members to package up their expertise and deliver it online so that they can create more time, money and freedom to do the stuff they love. Nicola is passionate about inspiring women in technology and helping more people to gain a better work/life balance. For more information visit www.jigsawbox.com.

Business Breakthrough – Positioning your coaching programs for profit

Today's business building breakthrough session is with Tania Walter Gardiner of Integral Connections. Tania is a graduate of the Art and Science of Coaching and the Passion into Profit program of Erickson College International. Tania is an extraordinary example of taking her passion and talent for coaching and creating a profitable coaching business. Today we talked about how to use three tier pricing to position and design your coaching programs to make it easy and compelling to have your potential clients make the decision to hire you as their coach. Tania shares her three-tier pricing model and how it has benefited her in growing her one-on-one coaching practice. 

Passion into Profit Coach Challenge: Create your three tier pricing strategy - make it easy for you potential clients to work with you!

Teresia LaRocque MCC, is Director of Entrepreneurship and Business Building Mentor for the Erickson Business Center –  www.ericksonbusinesscenter.com at Erickson College International www.erickson.edu. Teresia is a pioneer in the booming profession of personal coaching, the first recipient of the International Coach Federation’s Master Coach Credential in Canada and cofounder for the Vancouver International Coach Federation chapter. Teresia is committed to supporting coaches to take their talent and passion for coaching and make their entrepreneurial dreams come true. Teresia is the founder and facilitator of the Passion into Profit Program, a customized business building program offered through the Erickson Business Center. 

Be Real in the Virtual World: Building your Social Media Strategy

When you think about it, coaching and social media are about as similar as oil and water. Coaching is very human and real whereas social media seems intangible and impersonal. Although it seems counterintuitive, coaches who take advantage of “impersonal” social media have better opportunities to deliver powerful experiences, engender trust and build strong relationships with a larger number of their ideal clients.

Over the past decade, I have worked with a lot of coaches, many of whom feel uncomfortable about the Web as a tool for building their practice and building relationships. Here’s some of what I hear:

• I don’t know where to begin with social media, so I avoid it.
• I focus on human relationships and the web is impersonal, so it’s not the right tool for me.
• Working on the web takes a lot of time that I just don’t have.
• I don’t see the benefit of social media when it comes to finding my ideal clients.
• There are so many options (Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) and I don’t know which are right for me.

Do any of these statements resonate with you?

Social media can be your best opportunity for enhancing relationships and expanding your practice. The web is quickly becoming the place to find new clients and convince potential clients who are considering you that you’re the perfect coach for them. And more and more, people are using the web as a research tool – to find the goods and services they seek. And those services include coaching.

 

As Google quickly becomes our primary research tool; you can almost guarantee that prospective clients will scour the web to determine whether or not you’re the right coach for them. So you need to be visible and available in the virtual world if you want to expand your success in the real world! You need to be part of the virtual community so you can build real relationships.

 

When building your social media strategy, integrate these three essential actions:

 

1. Be Real.

Personal branding is based in authenticity. Your virtual world brand must match who you are in the real world. And unlike personal interactions, the web gives you fewer opportunities to build emotional connections with your audience. So you need to be crystal clear about what you want to communicate and committed to expressing the true you in everything you do online. That means branding your bio or social media profiles (injecting your personality, values, passions, etc.), incorporating your style and point-of-view into what you write and post and using your headshots and video as ways for people to get to know you and connect with you on a deeper level. Being ‘real’ when building your brand in bits and bytes will help you stand out and attract the attention of your ideal clients.

 

2. Be Focused.

The web is vast. According to worldwidewebsize.com, the indexed Web contains at least 8.71 billion pages. And there are literally thousands of different social media tools you can use. It would be exhausting to try to be visible everywhere. And maintaining conversations on multiple social media channels will squander your limited communications time.

 

To get focused, start with your ideal clients. Know who they are, where they show up on the web and how they like to interact. For example, if your target audience is sales executives, learn where they go for information, find the sales portals that accept guest posts, identify the top Blogs for salespeople (where you can post comments and connect with readers) and know which social media tools sales people favor (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, something else?).

 

And one last thing. Limit your preaching to the choir. It is great to be part of the coaching community on the web, but unless your ideal client group is other coaches, make the majority of your online contributions where your clients hang out. Sure, it’s valuable to connect with your colleagues on the LinkedIn ICF Coaches Forum; but don’t confuse that with your social media strategy for increasing visibility with clients. In addition to contributing to the coaches forum, join the LinkedIn groups where your clients spend time and become part of those communities too. Understand the difference between collaborating with colleagues and connecting with clients.

 

3. Be Consistent.

Whether you choose Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook or decide to have your own YouTube channel or Vlog, be regular. Social media only works if you work it. By that, I mean that consistency builds recognition and memorability. Strong brands don’t go into hiding and when it comes to the web, that’s doubly true. To make this happen, you need to put social media activities into your calendar or do-list. Strong relationships are built through regular, branded interactions. If you plan out a year of quarter at a time, you will be able to thread a story through your online communications to get your message heard and understood by those you seek to influence.

 

Social media is an outstanding tool for increasing your visibility with your target audience. Build your social media strategy around your personal brand - authenticity, focus and consistency - and you’ll expand your success and increase your fulfillment.

 

Dubbed the Personal Branding Guru by Entrepreneur, William Arruda is the founder of Reach Personal Branding, author of the bestselling book Career Distinction and Ditch. Dare. Do! and curator at Personal Branding TV (www.personalbranding.tv) - the premier multi-media resource for professionals interested in building their personal brand. If you liked this article, check out William’s latest piece in the February edition of Coaching World, entitled “Use Hue to Build Brand You: Eight Ways to Use Color to Get Noticed by Clients.”

Nurturing is not just for motherhood - it is also a critical quality for a successful coaching business!

You have done a great job marketing your services, you have captured their contact information (they are part of your database) now you must consistently nurture your prospects. What do I mean by nurturing?

Once you have their interest, you have to work to keep it! You can do this by creating an automated follow-up system that puts you and your expertise in front of your prospects on a regular basis. Maybe once a week, they get an e-mail that shares more value – another one of your unique processes, an interview with an expert, a resource – something that will make your ideal prospect glad to be on your list. Or perhaps you will simply set up a monthly newsletter.

These communication pieces should be:

• Speaking to the biggest problems that your niche faces. Educate them about the causes of their problems; explain certain aspects of the solutions.
• Delivered in your natural style, in a way that suits your attractive abilities (video, blog entries, podcasts, whatever feels most effortless to you).
• Highly targeted. Don’t be afraid to lose prospects that would not make good clients.

In every contact you have with your list of prospects, you want to:

• Speak to their biggest problem;
• Educate them on the cause; and/or
• Discuss the solution.

So, in every contact, and they're getting one of these three pieces.

By doing this you are establishing a strong relationship, you are building trust, credibility and sharing information that they experience of great value. Every once in awhile (every 3 or 4 contacts) you will invite the recipient to take the next step – that may be a free ebook, a free webbing, a complimentary coaching session.  You might say something like, “If these tips have created value for you, then you may want to consider a complimentary coaching session. Here’s how to register…. ” That way, by the time they are contacting you, they’re ready to get moving.

All of this can be automated so that every time someone becomes part of your community these series of messages is automatically launched.

Passion into Profit Coaching challenge: Consider how you will continue to nurture your online community. How will you communicate with them? How often? Through what means (newsletter, blogs, audio, video etc) and remember to automate!

Teresia LaRocque MCC, is Director of Entrepreneurship and Business Building Mentor for the Erickson Business Center –  www.ericksonbusinesscenter.com at Erickson College International www.erickson.edu. Teresia is a pioneer in the booming profession of personal coaching, the first recipient of the International Coach Federation’s Master Coach Credential in Canada and cofounder for the Vancouver International Coach Federation chapter. Teresia is committed to supporting coaches to take their talent and passion for coaching and make their entrepreneurial dreams come true. Teresia is the founder and facilitator of the Passion into Profit Program, a customized business building program offered through the Erickson Business Center.